Gunstar Heroes vs Sonic the Hedgehog 3 vs Super Mario Kart vs Super Metroid 2009
Results Round One Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 Ulti's Analysis Now THIS was a match. But before delving into the obvious, Sonic 3 deserves a mention for how badly it bombed here. A lot of people expected Sonic 3 to place in a match or two, and perhaps be the strongest of the three Genesis Sonic games this contest. Knuckles is the fan favorite of the series, and Sonic 3 always does well in favorite Sonic polls and board contests. But when Sonic 3 was put into its very first match, it sucked. There's no way of sugarcoating this. Two SNES games clearly splitting votes each broke 35%. That's embarrassing if you're expected to be strong, and this in turn made Street Fighter 2 and Sonic 1 look like complete crap. As for the part of this match that mattered, it was a barn-burner softened only by the format. With both games guaranteed to advance no matter what, the typical tension seen in close matches wasn't really there. In fact early on, there was nothing happening here at all. Super Metroid built up a 600 vote lead on Mario Kart overnight, and all the chatter about this match was how badly Sonic 3 was sucking it up. The match was close, but Super Metroid didn't exactly look uncomfortable. Then the dead night and morning votes hit, and it was on. Mario Kart chipped away at Super Metroid's lead all the way until the DSV (during school vote) started, and pushed Super Metroid's lead below 200. Super Metroid recovered during this time, but the game winning the morning vote usually catches fire during the after school vote, to the tune of swinging a couple thousand votes sometimes. Except this time, something really weird happened. Super Metroid looked like it would recover and easily win the DSV, but it was actually Mario Kart that made a push here. Once Metroid pushed its lead to 250, Mario Kart pushed back and used the DSV to get the lead down to 0. With winning the morning vote and DSV, it looked like Mario Kart would rock the entirety of the day vote and win this going away. But nope, this match was completely backwards. It was actually Super Metroid rocking the ASV, and it slowly built its lead back up to 270. It looked like Super Metroid had the match won here, but... nope. The second half of the very ASV Metroid was winning went in Mario Kat's favor, and it back to even by 6. This was about the weirdest close match ever, with trends going totally backwards from conventional wisdom. Metroid only won half the night, lost the dead hours and morning vote, blew the DSV, then... won the first half of the ASV? Before Mario Kart took the ASV's second half? Really, really strange. Metroid flew out to a 100 vote lead from here, but Mario Kart again came storming back to even things. The match stayed virtually deadlocked within 50 votes for a couple hours, but then the evening vote hit and Metroid made yet another move. It pushed itself out to a 250 vote lead by 11, and given how easily Metroid got its initial lead out to 600, it finally looked like this match was over. Yet inexplicably, Mario Kart won the final hour by 100 votes. Super Metroid won the match on paper, but this would be one hell of a 1v1 match after all the nonsense these two pulled on each other. There were of course a lot of cheating accusations, and given Bacon's topic during Battletoads of all things, we all expected a word from him. But nope. Nothing. Either this was legit, or Bacon doesn't care about telling us the numbers are or are not legit for every close match. I'm leaning toward the latter, though I've been told several times in private cheating is next to impossible these days. I'd love to believe this, but that Mario 3/Zelda 1 50 vote spike makes you wonder. This was a wonderful match that would have been a perfect 1v1 duel, but we'll take what we can get in a contest devoid of successful comeback attempts. As for what this tells us, Nintendo games are just whacky. There's no explanation for how some games split 80-20, but others go 50-50. I also think this cemented Super Mario Kart's status as the strongest Mario Kart title, though I think some might argue in 64's favor there. Match Trends Ngamer's Same Day Analysis Match Prediction it seems like just yesterday we were excited because we were finally going be be seeing a match between two games of at least respectable strength- but now we're got three! I agree with my Crewmates in predicting that this will be the best battle of the Contest so far (then again I'm not sure that's saying all that much), and I'm also going to agree with them in estimating that the final order will be Metroid > Sonic > Kart > GH. The difference is, I think it will be even more hotly contested than most are thinking! Why's that? Well firstly because Sonic really, really impressed me against SFII a couple days back. Now I know everyone wants to point to the SMW result and say "look what happens when Nintendo shows up!", but that's the same kind of '04 logic that had Metroid dead to rights with Zelda involved, and look how that turned out. Even with Samus and Mario featured prominently in the pic, I still wouldn't be at all surprised if Sonic pulled out first place in this one, and except him to run pretty close to Samus all day long in any case. As for Metroid, I have immense faith in this series, and in this title particularly. Even with it having to share the SNES with Kart, I think the genres and fanbases are different enough to allow both to perform closer to their potential than you would imagine in an SFF match. All three should remain pretty close, but I don't see SM ever being in serious danger of not pulling out the win here. As for Kart... I've got to admit, it's hard to get over the mental block imposed by that yoblazer-destroying loss to Mega Man. The series still has huge name appeal and a great casual presence, but I don't think its all that well suited to a 4-way format like this where you needed a large and dedicated fanbase in order to survive close matches. Or at least, it COULD be well suited if there was some way for it to avoid Nintendo's heavy hitters for a while, but with a bracket this N-packed that was never going to be a real possibility. And as for Gunstar, uhhh... thanks for playing! It's got some strong supporters that should keep it well out of that PoP/Crystalis realm, and I might even consider it to hit the double digits as a sneaky upset pick, but with the Genesis-dominating Sonic involved? Sorry, 7% is about the most that can reasonably be expected. With all that in mind, here are my predictions: * Super Metroid - 34.09% * Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - 31.76% * Super Mario Kart - 26.95% * Gunstar Heroes - 7.20% Kind of weird how we finally hit a legitimately debatable match and all of a sudden everyone pulls back into their comfortable shell and avoids going for any kind of upset. Except for our savior Ed Bellis! Next Day Review What an awesome match today! Even though I gave SMK enough credit to say it'd be able to keep it pretty close, I would never in 100 years have predicted that the two SNES games would be able to eat up 70+% of the vote in this match... and even if you'd told me that I would still have assumed that Metroid was at least 55/45ing the Kart entry. Don't get me wrong, I love the Kart series and have always thought that at least MK64 would have some decent potential in a Contest, but as I explained yesterday I just didn't feel the 4way format was well-suited to MK. Very pleased to see myself proven wrong here, especially since it means Sonic is out of the mix and thus as long as Super Met doesn't get as SFF-crushed by LttP as SMK (something I feel pretty good about), my crazy Metroid to R3 pick is going to be sitting pretty! External Links * Match Updates * Guru Match Predictions * Oracle Match Results • Previous Match • Next Match Category:2009 Spring Contest Matches Category: Contest Matches